Play It Again

How Ragnar Kjartansson turns repetition into art.

Kjartansson, center, in a scene from his video work “World Light,” inspired by a Halldór Laxness novel.

Courtesy the artist / Luhring Augustine and i8 Gallery, ReykjavÍk

“Bonjour,” a live theatre piece conceived, designed, and directed by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, premièred last October at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris. The story line is brief. A young woman wakes up in her second-floor bedroom, above a café in a picturesque French village. She gets dressed, puts a record on the old-fashioned phonograph (it’s Charles Trenet, singing “La Mer”), brushes her hair, and pulls on stockings. Simultaneously, a young man on the ground floor of the house next door has been making coffee and glancing at a 1958 copy of Paris Match. The man goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Moments later, the woman comes down the staircase on the outside of her house, carrying a vase of flowers. She walks to the public fountain in the space between the two houses, sees the man, and hesitates. He says, “Bonjour.” She replies, “Bonjour.” He watches her fill the vase at the fountain, turn, and walk back up the stairs. Just before she goes inside, their eyes meet again. He goes back into his house. After a brief pause, the five-minute sequence starts again. It repeats continuously, with different actors, working in shifts, for twelve hours a day.

I watched the first rehearsals of “Bonjour” with Kjartansson, who was wearing a three-piece brown suit and a colorful silk scarf tied at the neck. After the second run-through, he called out, jubilantly, “That was fucking awesome. You made me fall in love with both of you.” Exuberance is Kjartansson’s default mode, in directing as in life. Shorn of the reddish beard that he usually wears, and three months short of turning forty, he looked more robust than I remembered from our meeting in Reykjavík a year or so earlier. He gave the French actors a few suggestions, in English, asking the woman to face in a different direction when she pulls up her stockings, and telling the man, “Remember, you’ve been waiting a year for this to happen.” The actors both spoke enough English to understand his rapid-fire, Icelandic-accented delivery. While they prepared to do the sequence a third time, he turned to me and announced, “All my ideas come out of nowhere, and they never change. This one was like the ultimate French cliché. I wanted to make a play about a moment when something happens and something changes.”

Kjartansson’s recent rise to prominence in the art world has been based largely on videos, but he grew up in the theatre—the Reykjavík City Theatre, where his father directed and his mother starred in a wide repertoire of classical and modern plays. He spent much of his childhood backstage, watching actors rehearse scenes or parts of scenes again and again, and he likes to tell people that he was conceived on stage, or almost—his mother told him that it happened a few hours after she and his father acted out a steamy sex scene for a film they were making. This was in 1975. Kjartansson often feels that he is playing the role of an artist, rather than being one. His work, which is based on repetition and duration, not storytelling, could be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between performance art (filmed, videoed, or live performances by visual artists) and traditional theatre. In a railway station in St. Petersburg last year, backed by a full orchestra, Kjartansson sang the words “Sorrow will conquer happiness,” in Russian, for six hours. “Those words sound so magnificent in Russian,” he recalls. “And it’s how you feel in Russia now, where there is so much hopelessness.”

Performance art, whose earliest stirrings on the New York art scene came with the “happenings” movement, in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties, is now an international phenomenon. As a counterweight, or antidote, to the market-driven art world of obscene prices and speculative buying, it offers an art experience that reaches out to the viewer and demands nothing but a willingness to spend time with it. The form’s growing appeal to an audience of (mostly) younger viewers has obliged one contemporary museum after another to provide new spaces where it can be shown. Kjartansson’s brand of performance art, in which Nordic gloom goes hand in hand with non-ironic humor, has made him one of the busiest artists on the planet. His work appeared in more than twenty exhibitions last year, and this year’s schedule includes one-man shows at museums or contemporary-art centers in Detroit, Montreal, Berlin, Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, D.C.

His subject matter is increasingly political. In a new piece called “Krieg_”_ (“War”), at the Berlin Volksbühne, in March, an eighteenth-century soldier in a bloody uniform staggered about the stage for an hour, screaming continuously. For his show at the Tel Aviv Center for Contemporary Art in May, Kjartansson will present a series of plein-air paintings he has made of houses in the West Bank. “The piece is called ‘Architecture and Morality,’ ” he said, smiling broadly. “The Israelis won’t like it, and the Palestinians won’t, either. It’s just boring suburban architecture, but right now these are the most conflicted houses on earth.” I asked him if he thought that art could change people’s minds. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe in the truth of art. As my mother says, ‘Let’s not destroy a good story with the truth.’ ”

In 2000, when Kjartansson was in his last year at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, he made a ten-minute video, called “Me and My Mother,” in which he and Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, his mother, stand side by side, immobile, facing the camera. Every ten seconds or so she turns toward him and spits, vehemently, in his face. The shock, confusion, and uneasy hilarity of watching this exercise in family values are compounded by Kjartansson’s stoical lack of response. He considers this his first authentic art work. Mother and son have reënacted it every five years since 2000, and the four versions, which reveal subtle and not so subtle variations in age, stoicism, and saliva formation, were featured in his show at the Palais de Tokyo.

“My teacher in art school, a visiting Dutch artist named Aernout Mik, didn’t like the piece at all,” Kjartansson recalls. “He said, ‘Ragnar, this is really bad, because it is not true. Your mother is just pretending—she’s half-laughing. It is not a strong work.’ I was kind of heartbroken, until I realized that what he said about it was wrong. My mother was spitting on me, and she is an actress. She was pretending to hate me, but she did it badly because she loved her son, and that made it funny—and true. So I am grateful to Aernout Mik, because if he had not said what he said, I might never have discovered that.”

Kjartansson and Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, his fiancée, an artist and curator in Reykjavík, and their crew of Icelandic friends and assistants had come to Paris two weeks earlier, to work on the installation. They had brought Sólveig Katrín, Kjartansson’s five-year-old daughter from his marriage to the poet and performance artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir. The marriage ended in divorce four years ago, and they share custody of Sólveig Katrín. The whole group was staying in two rented apartments on the Left Bank. Kjartansson’s father and stepmother had arrived in Paris the day before, from Reykjavík. Being surrounded by people he had known for years seemed to boost Kjartansson’s confidence; although his Palais de Tokyo show was opening in a few days, I never saw him looking frazzled or even minimally displeased.

Ingibjörg left for Basel that evening, for the opening of a show in which her work was featured, and Kjartansson and I dined at the famous old Brasserie Lipp, where he had never been. (An enthusiastic tourist and instant Francophile, he and Ingibjörg had taken Sólveig Katrín to Versailles, the Jardin des Plantes, and several other obligatory sites.) He ordered the choucroute, and we talked about “World Light,” one of the video works in his show at the Palais de Tokyo. It was based on the four-volume novel of the same name by Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s greatest writer and its only Nobel Prize laureate.

Kjartansson’s father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, had adapted “World Light” for the theatre, and over the years he had staged three versions in Iceland. For the most recent production, in 2009, he asked his son to design the set, but Kjartansson was representing Iceland at the Venice Biennale that year, and he couldn’t do it. “I felt bad about that, because I thought it would be so great to work with my father,” he said. “But then, in 2014, I was asked to do a show in Vienna, and I had the idea of making a film of ‘World Light’ there.” Kjartansson and his crew turned the exhibition space into a film studio, and for a month visitors could watch them building and painting sets, sewing costumes, rehearsing scenes and shooting them in high-definition video. “I had wanted my father to write the script, but he said, No, you must do it. So I wrote a script in collaboration with Laxness’s grandson, Halldór Halldórson, a standup comedian and a very good poet, and Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson, the son of Laxness’s publisher. And my father was the assistant director.”

Kjartansson had never read “World Light.” “I read it for the first time when I was writing the script,” he told me. “But the book was in my head, from seeing all those performances. It’s a book about a poet—not a great poet, but a poor person who longs to be an artist, longs for beauty. The book is so hilarious, and so sad, and so beautiful. My father cannot quote from it without crying.” Neither can Kjartansson; when I visited him in Iceland, tears flowed as soon as he tried to read a passage aloud. Kjartansson has described “World Light” as a masterpiece of irony, mocking the romantic spirit yet full of love for it. He edited the footage shot in Vienna into a three-hour film, which he decided was no good. Working day and night, he then put together a twenty-hour montage of virtually all the collected footage, including retakes. This is the version that viewers saw in Paris last fall, on four large screens, in an empty room with cushions on the floor, so you could lie down and let it “wash over you,” as Kjartansson advised. Halldór Halldórson told him, “If my grandfather had seen this, he would have shot himself in the head.”

As a child in Reykjavík, Kjartansson liked girls better than boys. He got teased a lot in school, not so much because he played Barbie-doll games with the girls but because he was so bad at sports. “The coach would say, ‘Let’s watch Ragnar kick the ball in the goal,’ and I could never do it. They would all laugh and laugh, and I would go home crying and wish I was dead. But now I think the most glorious thing that can happen to you is to be bad at sports. The whole world opens up.”

His parents divorced when he was fourteen. His mother, who remembers that Ragnar, from the time he was three or four, used to listen intently to adult conversations, asked him whether she should continue with the marriage in spite of their difficulties. “Ragnar said, ‘No, you should not humiliate yourself,’ ” she told me. “He gave me courage.” Ragnar, who has no memory of this incident, has stayed close to both of his parents, and to an older stepbrother and stepsister from his mother’s first marriage. “My daughter is a celebrated actress here in Reykjavík,” his mother said. “My older son is a computer scientist. Ragnar was the dreamer, the one I used to call my prince of dreams. He was always so much fun.”

At school, he acted in every play. “Ragnar was a super-funny guy, always ready with a humorous comeback,” Markús Andrésson, his best friend in high school, told me. In Kjartansson’s junior year, they played leading roles in a production of “Sweeney Todd.” Theatre and music were his main interests in school and, later, in college. His mother had taken him to a Björk concert when he was six—Björk’s grandmother and Kjartansson’s mother were sisters. He remembers his mother whispering, at the concert, “She has a voice like a cannon!” The international success of Björk and of the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós had put Reykjavík on the world-music map, and for a long time Kjartansson dreamed of being a rock star.

In 1995, while still in high school, he and Andrésson formed a band, which they called Kósý. Grunge was the going style, in fashion, in music, and in teen-age behavior, and to buck the tide Kósý’s four musicians wore suits and ties, got short haircuts, and stuck to smooth pop tunes. Kjartansson played lead guitar and sang. “We thought being proper was far more abrasive at that point than being far-out,” he said. To their great surprise, they became popular. The band was booked to play for ladies’ fiftieth-birthday parties and other adult festivities, and the boys made serious money. Kjartansson has been in four other bands since then, all of them more abrasive than Kósý. “I was sort of famous in Iceland for taking my shirt off and shaking my tits,” he said. “But to be famous there is kind of a joke. Iceland is like a small town, where you know everybody, and what they’re doing. Björk’s kind of fame was way out of reach.”

Education and health care are mostly free in Iceland. After finishing high school, in 1996, Kjartansson astonished his friends by enrolling in the Home Economics School of Reykjavík, known to everyone as the Housewife School. “I was the first man to take the course,” he explained. “And I felt, wow, now I’ve actually done something with my life. I’ll hit the history books!” He learned how to cook, clean, iron, sew, make beds, and set the table, and enjoyed every minute of it. His father worried, apparently for the first time, that Ragnar might be gay, but his mother was not concerned. “I was becoming used to these things,” she told me. The course lasted three months. After getting his diploma, he thought seriously about going to theatre school, which is what his mother wanted him to do. He and his friend Markús talked about it, though, and eventually agreed that art offered more opportunities and more freedom than theatre or music. They both enrolled in art school. “We decided to go into the painting department,” Andrésson told me. “We were interested in the same romantic ideas—being a painter was something we identified with.”

Icelandic culture has always been literary, dating back to the medieval sagas. Visual art was virtually unknown there until the nineteenth century, when a few, largely self-taught artists took on the challenge of depicting the country’s stark, volcanic landscape. Kjartansson’s paternal grandfather was a sculptor and ceramic artist. “My father learned to paint from him, and so did I,” he said. “We all have the same line.” In art school, Kjartansson fell in love with the romantic image of Jackson Pollock and other macho, hard-drinking New York Abstract Expressionists. He drank a lot. (“I stopped being a drunk when I met Ingibjörg,” he told me.) His drawing teacher gave him consistently poor grades, but he soon learned that art in New York and elsewhere, post-Pollock, had opened up to an unruly mix of other disciplines, among them photography, video, and performance. By the end of his second year, he had decided that performance art was made for him.

Allan Kaprow, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and the early performance artists had defined their work as being in opposition to theatre—no narrative, no dialogue, no costumes, no set design, no stage or curtain or realistic illusions, and no willing suspension of disbelief. As performance art proliferated and expanded in the seventies and eighties, Marina Abramović and others abandoned the “sincerity” of raw performance to allow for spectacle and rehearsed actions, but without relinquishing the ban on theatrical illusion. Kjartansson, steeped in theatre since early childhood, lifted the ban.

His art-school graduation piece, in 2001, was a shamelessly theatrical bonbon called “The Opera.” Using the skills he had learned in painting and sculpture classes, he converted a small storage room at the school into a rococo theatre, with pink walls and fake eighteenth-century furniture, and for ten days, in a powdered white wig and an eighteenth-century costume, he sang made-up, Italian-sounding arias for five hours a day. The piece was funny, touching, ridiculous, and beautiful—all the things art students learned to avoid. “It was the first time I got good grades,” he remembers. “The teacher who gave the final grades—it was not Aernout Mik—said, ‘This is something you can really work on.’ ”

John Baldessari, the California conceptual artist, had come to lecture at the Reykjavík art school while Kjartansson was there, and during the question period Kjartansson stood up to say how much he admired Baldessari’s decision, early in his career, to burn all his paintings. “Baldessari looked at me,” Kjartansson recalled, “and said, ‘You really should work in advertising.’ I was a little offended, but then I just decided, O.K., I’ll do it.”

He got a job with a Reykjavík advertising firm called Ennemm, and spent the next four years there. “I looked on it as my master’s degree in art,” he said. “You use all the techniques of art, except that you’re lying.” He learned how to write scripts and make videos, and he spent a good deal of his time designing posters for his latest rock group, Trabant—it was named after the East German car, one of the worst automobiles ever made. Because he was still planning to be an artist and making art in his spare time, he never asked for a raise. “The pay was nice, and I thought, If I get a raise, I’m fucked,” he said.

Two things led him to quit, in 2005: an incoming boss who wanted everyone to work harder, and his marriage to Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir. (Grappling with Icelandic patronymics really takes it out of you. Let’s use first names for a while.) Ragnar and Ásdís had known each other since they were seventeen. She wrote poetry and made performance art, in each case with total dedication. Ásdís urged him to leave advertising for art. Ragnar has always admired strong women. He was very close to his godmother, a Danish woman named Engel Lund, who lived in the basement apartment of his parents’ house. Lund had been a popular lieder singer in Europe between the two World Wars, with a repertoire of folk songs in many languages. Family lore has it that once, in Germany, she received an invitation to sing privately for Adolf Hitler. She sent back a one-word reply, “Nein,” and left Berlin on the next train. When Ragnar was twelve, he used to go to her basement apartment every day after school. She would give him sherry, and tell stories about Oskar Kokoschka, Sigmund Freud, and other friends or admirers.

A few months after quitting the advertising job, he was invited to be in the Reykjavík Art Festival, a series of art events held in different parts of the country. His contribution was “The Great Unrest,” a monthlong performance in an abandoned, derelict theatre-and-dance hall in the south of Iceland, far from Reykjavík. He put boards painted to look like flames in the windows, dressed himself in the leather helmet and tunic of a medieval foot soldier, and played melancholy blues on his guitar for six hours a day. Only a few friends and family members showed up. “I was devastated,” he said. “But, somehow, it became sort of a legend, as the piece that no one saw.” Did he think people would come? “No, I knew they wouldn’t,” he said. Then why was he devastated? “Because I’m vain. But luckily my art usually goes in front of my vanity.”

During the next few years, his performance pieces, both live and on video, began to attract attention in Iceland and also in other countries. The Living Art Museum, in Reykjavík, commissioned him to do a work in 2007, and this led to “God,” a video featuring Kjartansson, in a tuxedo, with an orchestra of eleven formally dressed musicians, in a room draped from floor to ceiling with pink satin curtains. Swaying gently from side to side like a nineteen-fifties crooner, Kjartansson sang, in English, “Sorrow conquers happiness” (a slight variation of the words in his St. Petersburg piece in 2014), and kept singing the phrase at intervals for the next thirty minutes, with small fluctuations in tone and volume.

What, in God’s name, was going on here? A lot of non-ironic nostalgia, with echoes of Frank Sinatra and Hollywood Technicolor musicals, but also something more complex. “With repetition, narrative things like songs, concerts, or operas can lose their traditional form and become static—but vibrant, like paintings or sculptures,” Kjartansson explained. “I often look at my performances as sculptures and the videos as paintings.” Instead of following a story as it develops, the pliant viewer sinks so deeply into a single moment that it becomes epochal. Less pliant observers can always walk out.

I asked Kjartansson why he had called the piece “God,” and his answer surprised me. “I was sort of losing my religion,” he said. “I was so religious when I was younger.” He told me about going to the Lutheran church on Sundays with his mother (his father, a socialist nonbeliever, stayed home), and about serving, for eight years, as an altar boy in the Catholic Church. “I wasn’t Catholic, but I loved the rituals, and I lied my way into being an altar boy,” he said. “But I’d stopped going to church. And it was very freeing, somehow, to know that bad things were going to happen, and sorrow would conquer happiness, and we’re going to die, but that it’s all right, it’s all fine. I wanted a big title for this sad, reflective piece.”

Markús Andrésson, Kjartansson’s school friend, had decided to become a curator. He enrolled in the curatorial program at Bard College, the liberal-arts school in Dutchess County, New York, and for his graduation project, in the spring of 2007, he invited Kjartansson and Roni Horn, an American artist and writer who has been spending a lot of time in Iceland since the nineteen-seventies, to be in a two-person show that he would curate at Bard.

Kjartansson usually develops his theatrical pieces on the site. Andrésson had no funds to book hotel rooms, but he arranged for Ragnar to stay for three weeks at Rokeby Farm, a two-hundred-year-old, forty-three-room mansion overlooking the Hudson River a few miles south of Bard. Rokeby Farm is still occupied by descendants of its original owners, but the family money has long since run out, and the wallpaper in some of the beautifully proportioned rooms is faded and peeling. Richard Aldrich and his Polish-born wife, Ania, have devoted their lives to preserving it more or less intact. They live simply and are considered somewhat eccentric. Ania Aldrich is a student of shamanism. A friend of hers, learning that one of the Curatorial Fellows at Bard was Icelandic, got in touch with Andrésson and asked if he could perform a pagan ritual at Rokeby—something involving Thor, perhaps. “I thought, no problem,” Andrésson told me. “I can Google it. That is how I got to know these wonderful people.”

Kjartansson’s piece at Bard, called “Folksong,” consisted of him playing two melancholy chords on an electric guitar for six hours a day. A Bard trustee named Roland Augustine saw it and was instantly captivated. “It was like Samuel Beckett, somehow,” he recalls. “There was this existential crisis in what he was doing, and it really hit me.” Augustine introduced himself, and asked if they could talk later. “Being raised as a socialist, I would normally ignore a board member,” Kjartansson recalls. “But he said he liked my piece, so I went to meet him. And it slowly dawned on me that he was an important art dealer in New York.” They met again a few months later, when Augustine took his son to Iceland on a fishing trip. Kjartansson introduced them to some of his artist friends in Reykjavík. Augustine proposed that Kjartansson and Andrésson put together a group exhibition of new Icelandic art, which he and his partner, Lawrence Luhring, would present at the Luhring Augustine gallery, in New York. The exhibition took place a year later, and included Kjartansson’s “God” video. Augustine and Luhring also invited Kjartansson to join the gallery.

It was a turning point for all three. Luhring Augustine would show him in New York, and work jointly with his Reykjavík dealer, Börkur Arnarson, to represent him worldwide and to provide financial backing for his new projects. “There’s not a lot of money to be made in this area,” Augustine told me. “Ragnar had no market and people don’t collect video and performance the way they do paintings. But I embraced Ragnar in a big way.” The arrangement has worked well for everyone. Kjartansson makes far less than the top-selling painters and sculptors of his generation, but sales of his videos, in limited editions, and other work now bring him an annual income of around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which he considers a lot of money.

Interest in his work spread rapidly in the next few years. He has been in two Venice Biennales. “Bliss,” in which ten gorgeously costumed opera singers and a small orchestra perform the bittersweet, final aria of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” repeatedly, for twelve hours, won the prize for the most innovative work in the 2011 “Performa Biennial,” RoseLee Goldberg’s performance-art festival in New York. The Times’ Roberta Smith called “Bliss” a work in which “the audience, the performers, the ingeniously recycled material and the space itself merged into something that felt new and whole.”

His breakout work came the following summer, when he went back to Rokeby Farm with a group of Icelandic friends to make a multichannel video called “The Visitors,” one of the very few artist videos I have seen that is never boring. When it opened, at Luhring Augustine in 2013, nine large video monitors filled the darkened gallery. Eight of them showed different rooms in the nobly decaying Rokeby mansion, and in each room a single musician was playing an instrument—acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, banjo, cello, piano, drums, accordion—playing it slowly and reflectively, and periodically singing a quiet refrain that spoke of heartache and loss.

Kjartansson had taken the words from several videos and performances by Ásdís. She and Ragnar had broken up a few months earlier. “Once again I fall into / My feminine ways,” Ragnar sings, languidly strumming an acoustic guitar as he lies nude in a claw-footed bathtub full of water. A young woman in a filmy nightgown, Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, sits on a chair in another room, playing an accordion. “There are stars exploding around you / And there is nothing, nothing you can do,” she murmurs. Sitting at a piano in the drawing room is Kjartan Sveinsson, one of the original four musicians in Sigur Rós; he had left the band a year or so earlier, to work on his own music, and he collaborates frequently with Ragnar. The video images look like oil paintings, with deep shadows and harmonic color. (The cinematographer Tómas Tómasson has shot most of Ragnar’s videos, including “The Visitors” and “World Light.”) Hints of absurdity (Ragnar’s guitar getting wet) lighten the mood of sadness and regret. The ninth screen shows the Aldrich family and friends, sitting outdoors on their veranda. The complete cycle lasts for sixty-four minutes, and then repeats.

“The Visitors” was the most heavily attended exhibition Luhring Augustine has ever had. “People came back again and again,” Augustine said. There was something Pre-Raphaelite about it—a sense of youth and beauty and fleeting time. Artforum, the fount of highbrow art criticism, called it “deeply affecting—not a utopia, perhaps, and more bittersweet than sweet, but for that hour or so, very nearly ideal.” At least a dozen museums and galleries have presented “The Visitors” since then. Luhring Augustine made it available in an edition of six, priced at a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars each, and they have all been sold—one was acquired jointly by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Kjartansson’s career is still in its early stages, and what he will do next year or the year after is anyone’s guess. He has never really abandoned the romantic ideal of being a painter—or acting the role of one. For his show at the 2009 Venice Biennale, he set up a studio in a palazzo on the Grand Canal and painted a hundred and forty-four portraits—one a day, informal and fluid and a bit slapdash—of his friend Páll Hauker Björnsson in a Speedo swimsuit. (They smoked cigarettes and drank beer throughout the day, as artists are meant to do.) Luhring Augustine later showed the whole set of paintings together, as a single work, and sold it to an Italian collector in Turin. He and Sigurjónsdóttir have their own record label, Bel-Air Glamour Records, to release songs by their friends in Iceland, and music continues to be a major part of everything he does. In 2013, Ragnar and Kjartan Sveinsson began a collaboration on a four-act opera without actors called “The Explosive Sonics of Divinity” (the title is from Laxness’s “World Light”), which premièred a year later, at the Berlin Volksbühne. Kjartansson designed the four sets, each of which evoked a different majestic and melancholy landscape, and a string orchestra and choir performed Sveinsson’s symphonic, hour-long, Wagnerian score.

Another 2013 collaboration was with the National, his favorite rock band, at the MOMA PS1 branch in Queens. Kjartansson had them play one of their songs, “Sorrow,” continuously for six hours. “I think we all went into a bit of a trance,” Matt Berninger, the band’s lead singer, told me recently. “During the last hour, I started thinking about my daughter, and I completely choked up. The others took over the singing, and then the audience started—the whole room was singing. We were all in the same exhausted, milky space.”

Kjartansson’s problem right now is his tendency to take on too many projects. In Washington, D.C., in January, where he and Sigurjónsdóttir had gone to discuss his October, 2016, show at the Hirshhorn Museum with the director, Melissa Chiu, and several of her curators, much of their talk centered on a recent performance piece called “Woman in E,” which was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and would be coming to the Hirshhorn. It’s a tableau vivant of a woman dressed in a golden gown, sitting on a revolving platform and playing an E-minor chord on a guitar. “I had this vision of a woman drenched in E minor,” Kjartansson explained. Compared with “Bonjour” and several of the pieces in his Paris show, this one was relatively modest in scale, and Kjartansson said he liked that—he was tired of doing big pieces. Brushing aside a fall of dark brown hair, Ingibjörg giggled softly. “Look at her face,” Ragnar said. “I can tell by her face whether I am lying or telling the truth.” “You love big pieces,” Ingibjörg said. They are getting married on June 21st, in Reykjavík, a day after the summer solstice. His reliance on repetition as a structural principle may or may not be waning—there was very little of it in “The Explosive Sonics of Divinity.” “He has true confidence now,” Markús Andrésson told me. “If he wants to direct a film, or an opera, or go into theatre for five years, he’ll do it.”

He has no intention of leaving Iceland. “I get homesick very fast when I’m abroad,” he said. “In Iceland, there’s this idea that we don’t really belong in the world, this country in the middle of the ocean and so far from other countries. What I love about Iceland is that the only people we admire are poets. There are no great conquerors or heroes, no great industrial tycoons or politicians, and no respect for businesspeople or material wealth. Many of our sagas are about outlaws—there is even a statue of the Outlaw in Reykjavík, next to the National Museum—and the idea of the outlaw here is similar to the idea of the artist. I think making art comes from being a little allergic to society, not wanting to belong. Come to think of it, I am a really lucky bastard.” ♦